Opening Lines – Cyborg Nervosa

Hitomi remembered the awful tension everyone felt the year the census numbers showed that cyborgs outnumbered humans. It reminded her of the vids she was shown in school from the race riots a hundred or so years ago. The last gasp of White America as the dominant racial force in the United States, rattling its coffin all the way to the graveyard, pall-born by a beautiful brown mix of African, Hispanic, Indian, Arab and Asian.

But that had been natural. The rise of the cyborgs in the last quarter century had been advertised, encouraged, sponsored, packaged and sold. It was a commercial venture every one was in on. The speculation of the future of the human being, they’d called it.

When the numbers finally came out, it wasn’t so much that people were nervous about there being so many wired brains, kevlar muscles and nano birth controllers, instead they were nervous about what they were missing out on. What was it like to have in-brain Internet? What was sex like with a mono-filament reinforced penis? The curiosity hit critical mass and caused a run on the telepharma retails stores.

From her parent’s shitty apartment in Atlanta, she’d watched half the city burn in tech riots. That’s when she knew what she wanted to be: a journalist. Not one of those sissy under-paid, half starving biobloggers, but a real journalist. With paper and pens and dirt under her finger nails.

Hitomi had vowed from the start to never put anything online. It would protect her words, and protect her from the people that would want to do her harm because of them. The world may have tied itself together with a Gordian knot of glowing electron cable, but with her words, Hitomi aimed to cut that cord.